Win Battle, Lose War
Dr. Dawg is making fun of the IDers. Intellectually this is rather like little boys pulling the wings off flies: cruel, but inconsequential. Only the fundamentalist “no chancers” want to try and run the ID argument and when they do the billions of years and trillions of chemical interactions per year get in their way. However, the Dawg says something which I think suggests that, despite his trade union background and grad student foreground, he might finally be getting a picture of the sheer messiness of the real world.
“The social is simply too complex to attribute it entirely or even significantly to evolution.” Well Dawg I am delighted that you are willing to throw the fundamental premise of Marxism, namely that economics can be understood and even made to obey laws, into the ashcan of history. (Where it belongs.)
Once you have acknowledged that “the social” is too complex to be attributed to evolution you have begun a happy accent to a purely humanist understanding of the world. Science, per se, can only explain so much. (And I entirely agree with you on the looniness of the IDers and anyone else who thinks their particular Sky-God sat down and “created” in any but the most abstract, “lit the fuse for the Big Bang” sense.}
What is fun about your stand against socio-biology is that in taking that position you render absurd the claims of assorted socialists and utopians - not to mention St. Algore - who claim to have the economic, social and scientific answers to the world’s issues. The social, the economic and even the scientific are, indeed, complex. So complex that it would take the same sort of reductionism as the socio-biologists employed to come up with even an approximation of the true state of affairs.
We watched that reductionism play out in the failed states of Russia, fully Communist China, Cuba, the unlamented Warsaw Pact and, currently the delights of Zimbabwe. Poor buggers didn’t have a clue and, on your argument, couldn’t.
Part of the attraction of the libertarian right for me is its humility in the face of what we do not, and likely cannot, know. It is grand to see your gradual progression towards a deeper understanding of our ignorance.
Animals are complicated, humans are complex, populations are entirely unknowable. The fun of social science is to suspend one’s disbelief long enough to take a really close look at a particular belief or behaviour or trend. The danger of social science and economics - which is a social science dressed up in calculus - is that the practitioner is apt to think that he or she “understands” and therefore can “predict” the observed behaviour. This can go very well for quite sometime until, eventually, it doesn’t.
So long as it is an academic parlor game it is both interesting and valuable; but when it begins to encroach upon actual policy decisions it is a dangerous, anti-human, conceit. Which, happily, the Dawg has finally realized.
Written by jay on July 7th, 2008 with
9 comments.
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WL Mackenzie Redux
EBD
Greg
Bill
#1. July 8th, 2008, at 4:41 AM.
Jay:
Now, let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater here.
If by “the fundamental premise of Marxism” you are referring to unilinear social evolution, rather than physical evolution, then you haven’t been keeping up. There aren’t too many Marxists these days who would hold to the former. Marx and Engels did their best with what they had: they depended heavily on the research of Lewis Morgan. Since then, anthropology itself has, er, evolved. The teleology of Marxism has been largely abandoned.
The notion of social evolution is at best an analogy to physical evolution, and further confounded by ideas like “social Darwinism.” It’s also clearly based upon racism and Eurocentrism: the “their present is our past, our present is their future” kind of thing; the idea of the primitive. Johannes Fabian marked a turning point with his Time and the Other, and that work is now a quarter of a century old.
But I’d hang onto historical materialism. Class interests are real and demonstrable; world-views are generated by complex webs of such interests (no serious Marxist these days buys into the mechanistic “superstructure/base” dichotomy; I’m not sure that Marx did either). One can, at least grosso modo, point to aspects of our own culture that appear “natural” but which are actually constructs, conceived in social life and the outcome of power relations.
But my quarrel in the instant case is with sociobiology, which is reductionist to the point of sheer crudeness. It started, I guess, with Skinner’s superstitious pigeons, or maybe much earlier with Gobineau (sociobiology is attractive to racists), but these days it’s E.O. Wilson. It’s a fascist doctrine, in my opinion, and that suspicion is borne out in part by Kevin MacDonald’s rubbish, a stream of anti-Semitic quackery (so-called “evolutionary psychology”). MacDonald considers Wilson a mentor. And the racial scientists over at GeneXpression just love E.O. Wilson.
Human beings aren’t reducible to genes and evolutionary imperatives. But that doesn’t mean, on the other hand, that we can’t talk about class.
Just to say in closing, Jay, that, as usual, I’m on the side of the angels. No apostasy here, I’m afraid–just the ability to adapt to new learning and new circumstances.